Top 100 Quotes About Plato
#1. After reading the doctrines of Plato, Socrates or Aristotle, we feel the specific difference between their words and Christ's is the difference between an inquiry and a revelation.
Joseph Parker
#2. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters - like shoe-making - we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.
Will Durant
#3. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.
Allan Bloom
#4. Master Plato once said that Lux est umbra Dei; light is the shadow of God. I say this way: Light is the god of shadow!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#5. What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.
John Shelby Spong
#6. I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer.
Woody Allen
#7. Who knows but I shall grow reasonable at last, descend from my ideal heaven to the real earth, marry, and - Oh Plato! - make a pudding?
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#8. Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon
the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination,
that all knowledge was but remembrance; so
Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is
but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII
Jorge Luis Borges
#9. The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.
Harold Innis
#10. According to Plato, we don't learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.
Chuck Palahniuk
#11. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato
Peter Atkins
#13. How is the soul profited by the strife of Hector, the arguments of Plato, the poems of Virgil, or the elegies of Ovid, who, with others like them, are now gnashing their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruet tyranny of Pluto?
Honorius Augustodunensis
#14. Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.
Ann Marlowe
#15. Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
#16. Plato had no perception of the uniqueness of every individual, of his incommensurability with others, of each individual as forming a class of his own. He had no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies, and the combination of tendencies of which an individual is capable.
B.R. Ambedkar
#17. According to Plato, Socrates believed all knowledge came from a divine state, but humans had forgotten it. Most lived in a cave of ignorance, but one could become enlightened by climbing out of the darkness and understanding the divide between the spiritual and material planes.
Gwendolyn Womack
#18. Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily.
Bertrand Russell
#19. The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible
William Blake
#20. I was a bookworm, and very skinny with big, thick glasses. I never went on dates and guys were afraid of me because I was smart. So I got contact lenses, started to dress a little better and tried not to talk about Plato with boys. It worked!
Julianne Moore
#21. I don't want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had
Plato's white grandfatherly god
because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can't trust him with your kids.
William P. Young
#22. Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
Edward Abbey
#23. They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
Plato
#24. Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.
Max Horkheimer
#25. During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.
Ludwig Von Mises
#26. Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.
Ludwig Von Mises
#27. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.
Edward Gibbon
#28. Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
Tom Stoppard
#29. He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.
Ayn Rand
#30. [Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato ... He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.
Plato
#31. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.)
N.D. Wilson
#33. I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth.
Daniel S. Loeb
#34. Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend out lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished.
Koren Zailckas
#35. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today
Joshua Foer
#36. It was Plato, according to Sosigenes, who set this as a problem for those concerned with these things, through what suppositions of uniform and ordered movements the appearances concerning the movements of the wandering heavenly bodies could be preserved.
Plato
#37. How often when they find a sage
As sweet as Socrates or Plato
They hand him hemlock for his wage
Or bake him like a sweet potato!-Taking the Longer View
Don Marquis
#38. Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.
Jay McInerney
#39. Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#40. I have found that fate is as liquid and elusive a word as love. Plato thought they were the same ... Novalis wrote that fate and soul are two names for the same principle.
Liz Greene
#41. What she's learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We're all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to. Every day of her life, every minute of her life, if she could just remember that.
Chuck Palahniuk
#42. Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.
Apollonius Of Tyana
#43. When then any man assents to that which is false, be assured that he did not intend to assent to it as false, for every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth, as Plato says; but the falsity seemed to him to be true.
Epictetus
#44. The idea of Plato that philosophers must be the rulers and directors of society is practiced in India.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
#45. The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
Alfred North Whitehead
#46. One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
- Plato
Sienna Wilder
#47. If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.
Anna Brackett
#48. She's lived in Plato's cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she's been turned around to face the fire.
M.R. Carey
#49. One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.
Joseph Heller
#50. watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.
David Kahn
#51. And Pythagoras is reported to have been a disciple of Sonches the Egyptian arch-prophet; and Plato, of Sechnuphis of Heliopolis; and Eudoxus, of Cnidius of Konuphis, who was also an Egyptian.
[Stromata, 1.15]
Clement Of Alexandria
#52. For he (Cato) gives his opinion as if he were in Plato's Republic, not in Romulus' cesspool.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#53. No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.
John Archibald Wheeler
#54. Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.
Demetri Martin
#55. Plato said, be kind to everyone you meet for we are all fighting difficult battles.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#56. Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,
at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.
Randal Marlin
#59. Plato laid down the principle that it is impossible to look at something ugly without taking something of it into the soul, and it is equally impossible to be in contact with what is beautiful without reacting to it.
William McGuire
#60. The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.
Rollo May
#61. People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.
Dick Costolo
#62. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
Thomas Jefferson
#63. And were the vision of Democritus to have been adopted by Western civilization, instead of being cast aside for the pale views of Plato and Aristotle, we would be vastly further ahead today, in
Carl Sagan
#64. Quid confert animae pugna Hectoris, vel disputatio Platonis, aut carmina Maronis, vel neniae Nasonis? Of what benefit to the soul are the struggles of Hector, the disputations of Plato, the songs of Virgil, or the dirges of Ovid?
Honorius Augustodunensis
#65. The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
Nick Flynn
#66. Our connection to the teachings of Socrates, for instance, is through the written word of Plato, because Socrates was vehemently against the written word. Socrates thought that the book would do terrible things to our memories.
Clay A. Johnson
#67. So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.
Gilbert Ryle
#68. Plato has dramatic strength ... but is quite unaware of the strength of the argument against his position ... and allows himself to be grossly unfair in arguing against it.
Bertrand Russell
#69. My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more.
Debasish Mridha
#70. It was Zenocrates, not Plato, who denied that pain was an evil.
Walter Scott
#71. Today Plato is nearly forgotten. His beliefs include the notion that people who govern should be intelligent, rational, self-controlled, and in love with wisdom, an idea that has long been discredited.
Bobby Henderson
#72. Scholars may quote Plato in studies, but the hearts of millions shall quote the Bible at their daily toil, and draw strength from its inspiration, as the meadows draw it from the brook.
Moncure D. Conway
#73. The Establishment Won't Be Satisfied Until They Have Turned Us All Into Plato's Cavemen
Dean Cavanagh
#74. That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
H.P. Lovecraft
#75. Oh, if Plato could see me now ! Aristotle, traveler of time!
James Dashner
#76. Plato once wanted to punish one of his slaves and asked his nephew to do the actual whipping for he himself did not own his anger.
Seneca The Younger
#77. It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him.
Bertrand Russell
#78. The old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato 's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.
Oswald Mosley
#79. Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato ... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
John Milton
#80. Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
Bertrand Russell
#81. Why do people do this?'
'Blog, you mean? I don't know ... didn't someone once say the unexamined life isn't worth living?'
'Yeah, Plato,' said Strike, 'but this isn't examining a life, it's exhibiting it.
Robert Galbraith
#82. Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
Isaac Newton
#83. It was Plato who said: "The movement of sounds so as to reach the soul for the education of it in virtue we know not how, we call music
Zoe Kendrick Pyne
#84. Plato possessed the art to dress up illiberal suggestions in such a way that they deceived future ages, which admired the Republic without ever becoming aware of what was involved in its proposals.
Bertrand Russell
#85. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants.
Plato
#86. Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.
Marcus Aurelius
#87. Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.
Plutarch
#88. Plato is never sullen, Cervantes is never petulant, Demosthenes never comes unseasonably, Dante never stays too long.
Nathaniel Parker
#89. Walking is magic. Can't recommend it highly enough. I read that Plato and Aristotle did much of their brilliant thinking together while ambulating. The movement, the meditation, the health of the blood pumping, and the rhythm of footsteps ... this is a primal way to connect with one's deeper self.
Paula Cole
#90. How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#91. The happiest man is he who has no trace of malice in his soul. PLATO
Matthieu Ricard
#92. Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it endearing and encouraging that a legendary Roman philosopher had to reassure himself that it's okay not to be Plato.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#93. The only good thing that we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell.
Girolamo Savonarola
#94. The clearest argument against Plato's authorship is probably that Plato never wrote a work whose interpretation was as simple and straightforward as that of Alcibiades.
Plato
#95. Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.
Julian Baggini
#96. As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
Rebecca Goldstein
#97. The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
Stephen Jay Gould
#98. I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.
Bjorn Lomborg
#99. Plato ... teaches the separation of the human soul from its " home " in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas .
Paul Tillich
#100. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.
Lily King
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